Amazon has launched a new cloud service today for archival purposes and it is one that should make almost anyone who needs archival storage sit up and take note. The traditional choice for many enterprise and small business customers in the past was to use optical media or tape-based storage. The old way was both an expensive and time consuming process that you not only have to spend time backing up the software and sending out or archiving recovery data and making sure it has secure storage.

Today Amazon’s new service is looking to change that. Amazon Glacier solves all of these problems and does so in the cloud. This is Amazon’s second gamble that the cloud is the future of data storage for users and along the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Apple they are betting big on this, however this usage is targeted at the Enterprise market.

It has a price point that is as low as 1 cent a month per Gigabyte. For a single US penny you get a fully functional archival backup unit for up to a gig and there is no minimum or maximum amount you can pick from storage wise – Amazon has you covered regardless of the size. If you only need a gig that is no problem but if you need up to Petrabytes of data backed up they have you covered!

All of the downsides of Enterprise level backups are removed from switching to Glacier.

The entire concept of Amazon being used for cloud storage is clearly not new. In 2006 Amazon had introduced S3 which has been growing steadily for the last 6 years and now stores over a trillion objects. Amazon has a strong and proven track record with S3 for being dependable and Glacier uses the same technology with a new interface and ways to access the data to be designed ass archival storage for your business at a price point that can’t be beaten with the successful track record that Amazon has.

Glacier has your login and creates a vault for each of your storage backups that you would want to create with up to 1000 vaults per account. Each vault can hold up to 40 Terrabytes of data that is all encrypted in AES-256 so that you know your data is secure. The system itself stores itself 🙂 in numerous locations in a way that is constantly backing up and will monitor these backups to make sure integrity is stable across all of them so that you do not have to worry about data loss. When you need to access a backup you are going to have a 3-5 hour turn around time from the moment of requesting the backup until you can retrieve it. At that point you have access to the data for 24 hours. Data retrieval though can also factor in additional funds. You have access to up to 5% of your average monthly storage data for free each month however past that it will be an additional US cent per Gigabyte.

While Glacier won’t be for anyone any enterprise IT department, those with large areas of scientific and research data, or any business that keeps a LOT of data on-hand for their clients, could find a great use from Amazon’s new service.